Against stigma: studies in caste, race and justice since Durban

Historical barriers still inhibit comparative frameworks to map and challenge two of the most odious forms of discrimination racism and casteism. Both justify themselves on a principle of biological descent; they enable stigma as if it were a natural fact, refusing to see it as deleterious social exclusion.

Against Stigma carries fifteen essays that build upon the energies generated in scholarship as a result of the landmark 2001 World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance at Durban, South Africa. The contributors, who represent a multiplicity of disciplines and intellectual orientations, explore comparative aspects of caste and race including conundrums of a globalized discourse and national problematics of racism and casteism. The editors Introduction locates this comparative project around descent-based discrimination in a wide context; the editors suggest that globalization itself holds out the promise of more generalized practices of resistance and emancipation by oppressed national minorities. A critical bibliography on race and caste is a bonus to students and teachers of Human Rights, Race Relations, Caste Studies and Politics of Socio-economic Exclusion.

At a time when democratic movements are sweeping across the globe, Against Stigma presents a fresh selection of authoritative scholarship and instructive debates centered on race and caste, two of the most potent and divisive concepts in the histories of humanity, sociology and human governance.